Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 69371 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69371 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
"I look forward to hearing from you,” Luke says. As I walk out of the restaurant, my heart thumps in my chest the whole time. The sound becomes louder and louder in my ears, and when Edward opens the car door for me, I get in and grab my phone right away.
Me: Tomorrow morning meeting.
Chapter 4
Luke
I watch her walk out of the restaurant. My whole body has been one vibrating nerve from when my eyes met hers. No matter how many times I tried to get her to look at me, she avoided me. But the times she did look at me, I was hoping she would give me something, anything to indicate she didn't hate me. But her shield was up. I knew it the minute she looked at me. It was a shield that took me a year to break down, and in the span of one second and a very fucking bad decision, it was back up again. "Are you going to be okay?" I hear Mikaela and turn to look at her.
"You couldn't have mentioned that the bride was Clarabella?” I question while my hand grips the white rag that I used to carry out the hot plates.
"What difference would it have made? A bride is a bride." She puts her hands on her hips, shaking her head. "You've worked with her before."
"Yeah," my mouth says, but at the same time, my head says, before you messed it up royally. "Well, it's different working with her and working for her." I turn and walk away from Mikaela before I say something I shouldn't.
Instead of going to the kitchen and cleaning up my workstation, I head to the office. I slam the door behind me and toss the rag on the couch before going to the bathroom and turning on the cold water in the sink. My body feels like it's on fire as I cup my hands under the stream of cold water, splashing it on my face. When I close my eyes, all I see is her holding his hand and walking out with him.
She never looked back, not once, and trust me, I know because all I could do was stare at her. She was wearing tight black jeans that molded to her long legs, legs that I spent a whole night worshiping. Her ass fit perfectly in my hands when I picked her up. "You fucked up," I tell myself when I look at my reflection in the mirror.
I wipe my face with a towel. "She's getting married," I say in disbelief. "Fucking married." I shake my head, and the knock on the door has me turning my head. I don't know why, but for a split second, I think it's her.
For only one second before the door opens and Mikaela pokes her head in. "I come in peace." She’s holding two glasses in her hand. She walks in and hands me one of the glasses with amber liquid inside.
"Thank you." I drink it down in two gulps, feeling the burn all the way down to my stomach.
"Jeez." She puts her own glass to her mouth. "Are you sure you're okay?"
"I’m fine." I put the glass down on the desk and then turn to lean on it. "When can we start the staff meeting?"
"In about thirty minutes." She takes a sip of her drink and goes to sit on the couch. "They are just cleaning up, the last customer left right now."
"What has been going on?" I ask. "Obviously, with me in New York, I wasn't hands-on like I was before I left."
"Everything is pretty much the same." She shrugs her shoulders. "Hostess girls have been hard to find." I nod my head. "We've taken a lot more catering jobs than we did before you left."
"That's always good to help us grow. Word of mouth is everything."
"It's also thanks to Clarabella for that,” Mikaela says, and just hearing her name, my stomach sinks, and my heart speeds up. "She made us their top caterer at the venue."
"We were doing a lot of events before," I chime in. It was why I got so close to her, even though I knew it was a bad idea. But everything about her was amazing. Is amazing. She worked her ass off and never ever let you see her sweat. She was ballsy. She was sharp. She had an idea for how things needed to be. She never let anyone get away with talking down to her. She would nip that in the bud and make sure they knew she was not messing around. And she was absolutely drop-dead gorgeous.
"We were, but then she brought us in for corporate events, which then led to business booming every single day of the week," she points out, and I shake my head, wondering why she would do that after what I did to her. "It boosted sales, not just here but also at the pub."